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Mar 21, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Nicolas Premier

Dave Okumu, singer/guitarist with London three-piece The Invisible, is releasing a new album, I Came From Love, under the name Dave Okumu & The 7 Generations, on April 14 via Transgressive. Now he has shared its third single, “Amnesia.” It is part of a short film, Seduced By Babylon, which is the third of a four-part series directed by Nicolas Premier. Watch and listen below.

Okumu had this to say about the new song in a press release: “Consciously or unconsciously, it’s difficult not to feel that we are all contending with layers of heartbreak, both on a societal and personal level. There’s the loss of faith in our leadership, political systems and the mismanagement of our environment. But I also believe that this country suffers from an unconscious heartbreak at the loss of the Empire. And those who have suffered at the hands of imperialism are still subjected to its resounding societal echoes. The minority encounters heartbreak of a particular kind as it searches for experiential representation, healing and understanding, a way of being in an environment that seems to struggle to create the space for wider discussion and multiple perspectives. It opts instead for the intoxicating power of collective amnesia.

“The responses and adaptations around heartbreak are innumerable and include suppression and detachment, as well as a continual reframing of our personal and collective experience. However, the fact remains: you can’t deal with heartbreak without acknowledging heartbreak. This piece of music engenders a desire to meet these complex dynamics with love, space and honesty.”

Premier had this to say about the film: “How to make sense of the present when you lose your memory? What is this dream we have been sold? What has been forgotten, so crucially, in the wake of modernity and its brutal deluge on the planet? With Amnesia, I aim to place the audience alternately as viewer and stakeholder of the action. The vision is interrupted by the scrolling of a ghost train that speeds through the endless night. Fragments of the catastrophe burst in the intervals in saturated nightmares. The film creates a tension between the apparent ephemerality of the fire that spreads across the globe and its decisive aftermaths on the very possibilities of human life.”

Previously Okumu shared the album’s first single, “Blood Ah Go Run” and the accompanying short film You Survived So I Might Live. Then he shared its second single, “Black Firework,” via the short film The Intolerable Suffering of (The) Other.

Okumu had this to say about the new album in a previous press release: “The narrative of this record emerged in tandem with the origin of its musical journey, through a rumination on survival, ancestry and heritage. The account of the young west African girl who was transported to South Carolina in 1756 and sold to the slave owner Elias Ball and the subsequent unearthing and presentation of her story to her descendants became an emblematic framework for these songs, opening doors to many aspects of the diasporic experience. The music stands in loving defiance of any forces that would seek to disconnect us from our collective history. As I consciously stand before my ancestors through the medium of this sound world, I proclaim that ‘You survived so I might live.’”

Okumu’s previous solo album, Knopperz, came out in 2021 via Transgressive.

The Invisible’s self-titled debut album was nominated for The Mercury Prize in 2009 and Okumu produced and sang on Jessie Ware’s acclaimed debut album. Since then he’s also worked with Arlo Parks, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, St Vincent, Tony Allen, Grace Jones, David Lynch, and Adele. The last album by The Invisible (which also features Tom Herbert and Leo Taylor) was 2016’s Patience.

Also read our 2012 interview with The Invisible and our 2009 interview with them (which was The Invisible’s first American interview).

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